Searching the World Wide Web

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Quality Web Resources Providing Free Full-Text Article Content

* Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) [http://www.doaj.org/]. Launched in May 2003, Sweden's Lund University Libraries Head Office hosts this "one-stop shopping" open access directory, providing no-cost access to the full text of 2,200-plus journals. More than 630 journals are searchable on the article level (more than 98,000 articles available) in the sciences and humanities/social sciences.

* EEVL's Ejournal Search Engine (EESE) [http://www.eevl.ac.uk/eese/eese-eevl.html]. "EEVL: the Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing, searches the content of over 250 freely available full text ejournals in Engineering (160 freely available full-text ejournals), Mathematics (28 ejournals) and Computing (60 ejournals), selected for relevance and quality," including professional and trade journals and even some academic peer-reviewed journals. 

* FindArticles [http://www.findarticles.com/]. The FindArticles database is an updated replacement of its original free, searchable article Web archive, with the current service now searching 10-million-plus articles from "leading academic, industry and general interest publications." According to the site, it provides "free access to information you can trust, from a collection you'll only find here." You can also find magazines by topic and explore all publications by title.

* FreeFullText.com [http://www.freefulltext.com/]. "FreeFullText.com provides direct links to over 7000 scholarly periodicals which allow some or all of their online content to be viewed by ANYONE with Internet access for free (though some may require free registration). The issue(s) which are available for free are indicated for each title on the alphabetical periodical lists. The design of this site is optimized for users seeking specific articles for which they already have the citation."

* Free Medical Journals [http://www.freemedicaljournals.com/]. This site, "created to promote the free availability of full text medical journals on the Internet" [without advertising] was established by Bernd Sebastian Kamps, director of the International Amedeo Literature Service and editor of the Influenza Report textbook (2006) and the HIV Medicine textbook (2005). His site lists medical journals that are free now and those that are free 1-6 months after publication. You may browse by title (in English or several other languages listed) or by specialty area.

* Google Scholar [http://scholar.google.com/]. "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the Web."

* HighWire Press [http://highwire.stanford.edu/]. Hosted by Stanford University Libraries, HighWire Press provides more than 1.3 million full-text, peer-reviewed articles from 900-plus journals, in addition to quick full-text access to your institution's journal subscriptions to HighWire-affiliated journals via IP address recognition—journals to which you probably did not even know that you had access! (Click on "My HighWire" tab at the top, scroll down to "My Access," and click on the link under "My Institution's Subscriptions." You can also browse by topic, title, or publisher under the "For Institutions" tab.)

* MagPortal.com [http://magportal.com/]. MagPortal.com is another site for finding freely available magazine articles on the Web, using keyword searching or category browsing methods. Indexing a little more than 200 magazines, its focused content allows the site to update with new articles within days of availability. The material is of good quality and measures the similarity between articles, linking similar articles to each other.

* PubMed Central [http://www.pubmedcentral.com/]. "PubMed Central (PMC) is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature [providing free, full-text articles from 200-plus journals] at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, developed and managed by NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM)."

* Windows Live Academic [http://academic.live.com/]. "Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the Web" and possibly through IP address recognition through your library/institution. Launched in spring 2006 in cooperation with linking specialist CrossRef and several major academic publishers, this beta MSN specialized search engine provides content from approximately "4,000 journals & 2000 conferences" (source list is provided).

* Yahoo! Search Subscriptions [http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions]. "Yahoo! Search Subscriptions enables you to search [mostly] access-restricted content such as news and reference sites that are normally not accessible to search engines, [and it] expands your Web search experience by enabling you to find relevant information from the Web and your online subscriptions. You can search a combination of generally available content and subscription content, or search a combination of different subscriptions."

Quality Web Resources Providing Free, Full-Text Book Content 

* Amazon.com's "Search Inside the Book" [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/103-8733886-7163818]. "Search Inside!" is a feature offered by Amazon that enables you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. The previous "Look Inside" search displayed books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords matched your search terms. But with Search Inside, results will include titles based on every word inside the book. To be fair to publishers and authors, Amazon only allows Search Inside users to read a portion of the book online.

* Bookshelf [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=Books]. Bookshelf, a "growing collection of [full-text] biomedical books (50+) that can be searched directly," is brought to us by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

* Google Book Search [http://books.google.com/]. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information, but much of that information isn't yet online. Google Book Search (formerly Google Print) aims to get it there by putting book content where you can find it most easily—right in your Google search results." There is a Google Book Search "Partners Program" (aimed at publishers) and a "Libraries Project" underway.

* International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) [http://www.icdlbooks.org/]. ICDL is a "public library for the world's children," which started as a collaborative project by the University of Maryland and the Internet Archive (IA). Here, you can read more than 900 free children's books written in 34 different languages! "The mission of ICDL is to select, collect, digitize, and organize children's materials in their original languages and to create appropriate technologies for access and use by children 3-13 years old."

* The Million Book Project [http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/MBP_FAQ.html]. The Million Book Project (600,000 thus far, 135,000 in English) is a coalition of Carnegie Mellon University, with assistance from the Internet Archive [http://www.archive.org/] and other libraries around the world.

* The National Academies Press (NAP) [http://www.nap.edu/]. "The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health." It also has a small number of Transportation Research Board-published books available for free download (chapter and/or book).

* The Online Books Page [http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/]. John Mark Ockerbloom at the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page has 25,000-plus works that are "freely readable over the Internet" and it "encourage[s] the development of such online books, for the benefit & edification of all."

* The Open Library [http://www.openlibrary.org/]. Created by the Internet Archive (see additional info on IA later) to "demonstrate a way that books can be represented online." I love the way you can read and turn the pages online here, but not many are available, yet. Their vision is "to create free Web access to important book collections from around the world."

* Project Gutenberg Free eBook Library [http;//www.gutenberg.org/]. Michael Hart's Project Gutenberg is "the oldest producer of free electronic books on the Internet," comprising 18,000-plus pre-1923 "literary works that are in the public domain in the United States."

Possible Precursor to the "Universal Library"?

Search leaders and digitization entrepreneurs continue to work on their projects and join forces to form alliances to make full-text materials even more publicly available. Consequently, librarians and other educators need to stay alert to the ways in which these digital entrepreneurs work with and for us to continually change the face of the scholarly Web. I, for one, am grateful that general and specialized search services are continually improving their methods of locating, storing, and sharing this timely, comprehensive, and relevant full-text material, and including various multimedia formats. But in my opinion there is a clear leader—a favorite—among many searchers looking for quality digital content, probably because of the immense size and diversity of its holdings and the vision of its founder: The Internet Archive. In fact, several of the resources mentioned earlier in this article are related in some way, shape, or form to the IA and its initiatives, including the relatively new Open Content Alliance. Do yourself a favor and visit the following sites and their linked resources. Who knows—maybe the IA and all of the Internet Archive-conceived sites will, together, become the precursors to the "universal library" mentioned in Kevin Kelly's very thought-provoking May 14, 2006, New York Times Magazine article, "Scan This Book!"

* The Internet Archive (IA) [http://www.archive.org/]. The Internet Archive, mentioned several times earlier in this article, is widely known for its Wayback
Machine service, allowing us to "visit" older versions of Web sites by typing in a URL. However, IA offers so much more, such as moving images, live music, audio, and text archives. The site truly is "building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form." Like a paper library, the site provides "free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public." You really should take the time to browse this site, and fairly often—I love it!

* The Open Content Alliance [http://www.opencontentalliance.org/]. "The Open Content Alliance represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive [http://www.archive.org] and Yahoo! [http://www.yahoo.com] in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture." Right now, other partners include Adobe, HP, MSN, the European Archive, O'Reilly Media, RLG, the University of California, the University of Toronto, and many others—and the list keeps growing!